well back to the big picture i'm tom arbonne coming up in this half hour we all know mitt romney hates government regulations but is romney's fate of regulations the cause of america's latest meningitis outbreak also tonight all across america little kids are going door to door filling their pillow cases with sugary treats but this one hollowing than just chocolate bars scary costumes and jackal letters and our nation's electoral college may be responsible for putting a president in the white house but it's also helping to protect cheap labor i'll explain in tonight's daily take.

in screwed news across eighteen states twenty nine americans are dead another three hundred forty four sickened by a growing meningitis outbreak and mitt romney might be responsible as craig unger at salon reports this week the pharmaceutical company there was a responsible for the outbreak massachusetts based new england company company was cited for numerous violations in two thousand and four while mitt romney was governor however his administration did nothing to punish the company or place more regulations on it or show between two thousand and three and two thousand and six there were six complaints against the new england company yet the romney administration did not crack down on that company and instead sign an agreement allowing the company to regulate itself in the future so it should be noted the new and combine in company is a big. both mitt romney and republican senator scott brown in massachusetts but as

a result of their self-regulation ordered by romney twenty nine americans are now dead as an attorney representing the victims argues quote it goes all the way up to mitt romney when the person who is supposed to be in charge of oversight does not believe oversight is necessary this is what happens and quote this is why a romney presidency would be so dangerous to america the safety of our air our water our food our medicine is in jeopardy thanks to government regulations that mitt romney wants to get rid of we know what happens when we try to let capital it capitalism regulate itself economy's crash and lives are ruined for more on this might happen tonio joins me and turning into host of the ring of fire radio program mike welcome back how. would i be going too far if i said mitt romney is responsible for the deaths of twenty nine americans not at all i would say the same thing mitt romney is the prototype for deregulation everything republicans stand for where the consumer simply has to rely on the honest responsible nature of of

corporate america in the million jobs catastrophe twenty five people are dead already because of that unsophisticated law way of thinking and mit is directly responsible when you follow this case in drill down on the facts of this case so what does this say about this whole conservative and libertarian minded view that the there's this magical thing called the free market and if you just stay away from it it'll regulate itself and everything will be wonderful and and you know the food will be safe in the drugs of the pure and i guess just like it was in one thousand nine hundred. well this is this is a perfect example this is a situation where you had a corrupt c.e.o. of the massachusetts compound in company that committed fraud ok that it was out out nat fraud it was reckless disregard for human life and in the way that he ran his drug company and here's how mitt allowed it to happen here's what happens every time you let the free market to go and regulate this is this is

a perfect example he first of all this is a friend of minutes this is a friend who was a campaign contributor and he let them get away with all of these other problems that started in two thousand and four with a slap on the hand and this is a company that really was an outlaw company it was crystal clear to mit and the agency that was supposed to be overseeing this that his friend was operating in this is this is kind of missed the news but his friend was operating even without a license to do the type of thing that he was supposed to do they were put on notice of it don't do that they were slapped on the hand and they continued to do it they were also put on notice this company that they were operating the operation where the lab equipment had not been sterilized at all complete lots of medication were sent out without any kind of sterilization inspection they were slapped on the hand again and mitt said this this is what's incredible and this makes your point tom this makes your point about what happens with this trickle down regulate you

know regulation where we just they're supposed to take care of themselves mitt said to this company by way of his agency you can regulate yourself is incredible as it is time after time they have been caught breaking the law in minutes said you know what you just regulate yourself and everything's going to be ok and twenty five people twenty six people still the death toll is climbing because of this mitt's point was that he wants to end job killing regulations as he puts it and replace it with people killing. and that's the type of government the republicans want for all americans this story really tells every detail about what deregulation looks like papyrus air an attorney who represents people who have been damaged by corporate greed and misbehavior if you are representing these my understanding is that the latest death toll numbers as of an hour ago we checked just before we went on the air is now twenty nine it's apparently several people have died just in the last

day or so. if you were representing those people what would you be doing with regard to mitt romney and his governorship. well first of all from a from a legal standpoint mitt romney is going to have immunity for any kind of decisions that he made as a governor but the court the problem in this case. is that you're going to have met you have twenty nine deaths today those deaths are going to continue continue to climb and this is a company that doesn't even have the financial wherewithal to pay for all of that so the next question is can you sue the agency well yeah you can but then you have to count on the legislative process to be able to pay the money that you might get by way of a judgment this story is told again and again one hundred thousand deaths a year occur two million serious injuries occur every year because of cover ups and fraud in kickbacks and political friendships like we saw between mitt romney and the folks who run this company by comparison if you look at

a country that does regulate canada ten thousand drug related deaths a year not one hundred thousand and that's because they take it seriously i handled the vioxx case for example and i saw sixty five thousand people die because of deregulation where merck nobody was perp walk nobody was arrested they simply paid these claims and went on and did business as usual so deregulation is perfect for a pharmaceutical company because all they do tom is they calculate how many people are going to die how much profit they're going to make and then they figure out if it's going to be profitable in the end that's what merck did on vox and that's what every pharmaceutical company does when they calculate can they get away with killing people and they they can get away with it under the type of idea that mitt romney has about about deregulation. mike papantonio thanks so much for that analysis thank you so much appreciate your insights.

in the best of the rest of the news tonight kids all across the country are running around the neighborhoods dressed up in as many characters as you can imagine and knocking on every door within walking distance to collect as much cavity inducing candy as they can carry it is that what this holiday is really all about joining me now to break down the real story about this day is dr steven larsen a practicing psychotherapist psychologist professor emeritus at the state university of new york and author of ten books including the schama is a doorway open imagination to power and myth dr larson welcome. thank you tom you know the sherman is a good place to start our conversation because if you go way back into the urgency of prehistory you find this primordial figure wearing masks and

coming out of the supposed cruel darkness of the paleolithic caves and here is seen the film cave of dreams just released a few years ago you see the handiwork of the shermans interacting with the animals and the spirits of the animals and so you'll probably see out there in your average helloween parade a whole bunch of animals of some kind. birds and bears and wolves and stuff like that along with the spirits and the ghosts of the dead which by the way is also the province of the showmance so is this i say there are shamanic routes for holloway north and hollowing come out i think of hollowing i think very often of you know they actually i think of catholic countries they they seem to be very end of this or you know brazil or in the end states and you know down in new orleans things like that catholic countries are kind of scared of how we mean it's

a cross quarter festival it's not the birth of christ it's not easter it is associated with ancient harvest festivals and the end of an old calendar and the beginning of a new one but. the churches have always been kind of frightened of the affection that common people bear for ghosts and things that go bump in the night and children of course love it because children love to be terrified. interesting how does hollowing survive if the if the churches are opposed to it and a government doesn't promote it i mean. and and you know it's made it for how long it runs on pure psychic fuel that is to say people running around in the dark scaring each other is that's one of the oldest occupations of humanity i think and

throwing things and playing tricks that in that invokes the ancient trickster figure trick or treating. yeah yeah k.o.a.t. or raven or in africa it's a nancy the spider figure in some cultures it's the it's the hair and. yet trickster is there at the beginning at the dawn of creation and he is sort of. shakes up the conventional apollonian world creation view that everything is orderly god's in his heaven and all to right with the world because as we know the world is far from perfect so who the hell is responsible for all the mischief and that's probably the trickster that's got to be saving we just have twenty thirty seconds left do we see parallels to hollowing in most other cultures in most other cultures you certainly

do for example the worship of the ancestors the worship of the dead the deal and there was more to toss in the in the hispanic culture is it's really all over the planet and it's only modern scientists. we socialize people who really need a lean ok or steve commercialised to just scare them properly and right dr steven larson thanks so much for being with us stephen pretty soon all right to get you to . the electoral college didn't just choose doesn't just as our president also protects cheap labor i'll explain why and still take.

governor romney and i we both agree we agree we ought to bring the tax rates down i felt the same as the president did governor romney i'm glad. you agree with let's come back to something the president i agree on and then to you agree that the voters have a choice going up so that's when you wonder who to vote for when romney and obama agree on so many things remember you do have other options come november sixth tuned in to see the second round of debates between the major third party candidates right here on our t.v. . you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that many americans call a donor. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about what you sir are a fool you know what that is my their terrorist cells in your neighborhood all want to give us a defeat terrorism the only liberal the christian public you. can see you're totally devoted to. you know the corporate media distracts us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry that sells of sensationalistic garbage he calls it breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that.

just. the good the bad and the very very piano grossly ugly the good the new york times yesterday the times editorial board officially endorsed the marriage equality ballot initiatives will be voted on in four states on election day in the endorsement the paper urged residents of maryland minnesota maine and washington state to not place their state so sharply on the wrong side of fairness editorial went on to say that the freedom to marry is a fundamental right that should not have to be one or defended at the ballot box unfortunately is sad reality america is that marriage equality does in fact have to be put to a vote let's hope that more and more americans realize that everyone should have the right to marry whomever they want and vote for marriage equality on election day the bad vandals in tennessee and those in tennessee placed

a derogatory bumper sticker on the window of the sumner county democratic headquarters. reads the bro it is ho got to go and obvious reference to president obama and first lady michelle obama unfortunately is sort of racially charged attack on the president is nothing new about the campaign season other racially charged displays include the hanging of an obama effigy in the front yard of texas and a depiction of the president as a witch doctor in new jersey these kinds of displays and these racially motivated attacks have no place in politics or in american society and the very very ugly mike huckabee huckabee the former arkansas governor and presidential candidate lend his voice to a new ad put out by value voters usa an organization that claims to be christian and non-denominational citizens who believe americans should vote based on life family and faith and the ad huckabee argues that christians across america must quote vote based on values that will stand the test of fire or in other words i

could be as saying that anyone who doesn't vote for mitt romney is anti-gay marriage equality anti women's rights. janda is going to the fires of hell huckabee is the same man who has strongly opposed marriage equality and even pushed to quote amend the constitution so it's in god's standards and quote but telling anyone who doesn't vote for mitt romney of their going to hell that it's very very. electoral college the way we pick our president and our vice president is all about cheap labor when it was put into place in seventeen eighty nine it was to give slave holders a greater national voice part of a compromise with the slave states to keep them in the union. says me so back then

it was all about cheap labor it was called slavery at that time but it's still about preserving cheap labor in america although we no longer call it slavery and it's still all about giving more power and influence to the barons of the cheap labor states here's how we like to believe our founding fathers had infinite wisdom on this issue we like to believe that they carefully crafted electoral system that would level the playing field among states preventing a larger states from drowning out the voices of the smaller states we like to believe that they had some larger idea about how states should interact with each other every four years to elect our common our commander in chief but they didn't at the founding of our nation the issue of the guard of the senate was indeed about small states versus big states every state got to two senators a matter how big they were but when it came to the electoral college picking the president it wasn't about that at all instead it was all about preserving the power

of slave owners. as constitutional scholar and yale law professor oc kiel amar pointed out about our history we never actually have a breakdown in american history between big states and small states the line is more geographic it's north against south north against south and what was the difference between the north and south at the beginning of our nation slavery the electoral college was never created to protect small states it was created to protect slave states there was the political problem a slave states were facing in the beginning of america there were very few white males the legal voters of the day living in those states slaves made up large portions of the population in the south but they weren't allowed to vote so when it came to representation in congress the slave states found a workaround to this problem with the so-called three fifths compromise as for the

house of representatives that would have three fifths of the slaves in a state counted towards that state's population the population being used to calculate how member how many members of the house of representatives the state would be able to send to washington d.c. the goal and effect of this was to give the slave states more representation in the house than they would have had if only their small population of legal white voters was counted with that pin in place when it came to electing a new president with three fifths compromise also help the slave states who had more members of congress for white voter than did the northern non slave states if the president was elected simply by the majority of the votes in the country the south would have had that many voters because they had such a large population of stave slaves who could vote there for very few votes would be coming out of the slave states to determine who the president ited states would be meaning the southern slave owners would be marginalized during presidential

elections. that threatened even the survival of the institution of slavery itself as so many legal voters in the north opposed slavery which is why they compromise with the electoral college in order to keep the slave states in the united states rather than just having a popular vote to choose the winner like nearly every other election we have in our country from dogcatcher all the way up to a member of the house of representatives our president is chosen by a lack tours representing the states the number of electors each state gets is determined by how much representation each state has in congress the number of representatives plus senators for example florida has twenty seven members of the house of representatives and two senates senators thus the stake is twenty nine electoral college votes. so slave states with small voting populations were given a louder voice in our congress thanks to the three fifths compromise then these

slave states were given a louder voice in our presidential elections to because the electoral college is based on that same inflated congressional representation got it thanks to the electoral college protected slaveholders they were able to keep their influence on our government for much longer than they likely would have without this system the slavery is gone today but the electoral college still serves as a system to protect the new slave owners and their more humane forms of servitude low wage unionized non-unionized labor the slave states of yesterday have been replaced by the so-called right to work for less states of today the right for and so work for less taft hartley law was put into place in one thousand nine hundred seven by republicans in congress president harry truman vetoed this very anti worker legislation but the republicans overrode his veto and we've been stuck with

it right up to this day. right to work for less states workers can opt out to unions and stop paying union dues but continue to collect all the benefits of their union like better wages and safer working conditions that can basically become freeloaders what this does and many do what this does is a starves the unions of revenue of do it fractures the organized labor movement and it ultimately helps the big corporate bosses who want to bust up the unions and they do in fact the proof is in the numbers as a result the average worker in a right to work for less state makes about five thousand dollars a year less than his or her counterpart in the other states in the union also twenty one percent more workers in the right to work for less states lack employee employer provided health insurance and workplace injuries and deaths in right to work for less states fifty one percent higher can you say cheap labor

that's what it's all about just like that's what's lavery was all about if you were to lay out a map of slave states from eight hundred fifty over a map of so-called right to work for less states today they would be nearly identical. with the one exception being kentucky are the two exceptions of kentucky missouri which were slave states but not yet right to work for less states so here's the old confederacy here and the orange states were the slave states and you know this up in here was these were not yet states these were unincorporated territories so you know arguable but. there was an there wasn't slavery in this area here is. the map right now of the right to work for less states. and the states where unionization is allowed and enforced and what you'll notice is that all those without exception is

a couple of slight changes here iowa indiana that and indiana is more recent just recently became a right to work for less state that the map of the you know this this is where the country ended back on the map of the right to work for less states on the map of the slave states it's pretty much identical. so and just like the slave states of all the right to work states of today which generally vote for republicans take more benefits from the government than they pay in taxes and tend to be in the south and surprise receive an a disproportionate boost in the electoral college. again since the electoral college factors in the number of senators each state has and since each state regardless of population gets two senators and these smaller right to work for less states the former slave states have an inflated representation in our presidential elections as mo rocca wonders about the electoral college in the pages of the new york times today it certainly favors

states with smaller populations but one hundred thirty nine thousand eligible voters in wyoming get one electoral college vote but it takes nearly four hundred seventy eight thousand eligible voters in pennsylvania to get a single college vote is wyoming really need to be protected. and no surprise here wyoming is a right to work for less state and pennsylvania is not so from the very beginning of our republic cheap labor corporatists they were called slave holders back then were able to manipulate our electoral system to protect their own cheap labor resources we had slaves in the eighteenth in one thousand nine hundred three are minimum wage workers in the twenty first century. now that we know the game is going to end time to end it and give workers and not their cheap labor or overlords more say in our democracy several states are doing just that nine states have passed national popular vote laws which commit their electors to vote for whichever

candidate wins the national popular vote even if that candidate lost the state electoral college vote those nine states that have passed national popular vote laws include california maryland and illinois accounting for one hundred thirty two electoral votes among them nearly half of the two hundred seventy needed in the electoral college to win the white house if this trend continues and enough states sign up their combined electoral college votes to add up to two hundred seventy and the electoral college dies just like that so far only blue states are on board with this idea but red states mostly because their power brokers want to keep cheap labor they still prefer the electoral college but look at the polls heading into this election where there's a chance that president obama could lose the popular vote yet win the electoral college come out and stay president if that happens maybe some red states will jump on board with this idea for more information on this go to national popular vote dot com. and that's the way it is tonight on the big picture wednesday october

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